“I’ve also met a mayor who is determined to revitalize his small town and bring in new businesses.”

This can’t work. There are thousands of small towns that are losing population. If they are all competing to attract new businesses, be prepared for massive abuses by Business. None of them will pay taxes.

The guy moving back after MIT and Microsoft sounds nice but certainly isn’t scalable. The more education people get, the less likely they are to move to a rural area. This is one of the reasons why there is a doctor shortage in rural America even though doctors make more is absolute dollars, not to mention after cost of living in rural areas. They have to work non-stop in rural places, send their kids to mediocre schools, have nothing to do socially and be isolated from others with their education level. You can’t get many immigrant doctors out there either because they risk getting treated like crap.

The study examined data collected from 40 municipal broadband providers and private throughout 2015 and 2016. Pricing data was collected predominately by visiting carrier websites, where pricing is (quite intentionally) often hidden behind prequalification walls, since pricing varies dramatically based on regional competition.

In many markets, analysts couldn’t make direct comparisons with a private ISP, either because the ISP failed to meet the FCC’s 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up standard definition of broadband (a problem for countless telcos who refuse to upgrade aging DSL lines), or because the ISP prequalification website terms of service “deterred or prohibited” data collection.

But out of the 27 markets where they could make direct comparisons, researchers found that in 23 cases, the community-owned ISPs’ pricing was lower when the service costs and fees were averaged over four years.

Indian agriculture is going to witness Internet of Things (IoT) applications soon as SenRa, a pan India Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) provider for long range-based (LoRa®-based) IoT applications, and Skysens, a Turkey-based LPWAN technology provider, today announced their partnership to bring cutting-edge, low-cost, and long-range solutions to India. The collaboration between the two companies will provide needed solutions in a growing IoT market in India and will provide more efficient and environment friendly offerings. This LoRa® ecosystem partnership brings a combined knowledge of LoRaWAN technology, to include network services, connectivity, and end-device expertise.

"We are excited to announce our partnership with Skysens. We believe partnerships like this will bring innovative solutions to address some of the current challenges which are present in India today," said Ali Hosseini, Chief Executive Officer of SenRa. "For example, agriculture is the main source of livelihood for about 48% of the Indian population. Due to lack of resources and ongoing climate changes, it is more critical than ever to provide farmers the tools they need to produce crops and manage their limited resources. Leveraging solutions such as Skysens soil sensors, provide farmers the ability to monitor their soil and determine the health of their crops in real-time,” Hosseini added.

From the start, the government of this emerging state wanted to do something to immediately and significantly improve people’s lives. Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao decided that running water is an absolute necessity. Bringing that to the state’s thousands of rural villages required laying pipes. K.T. Rama Rao, who is the minister of Information Technology and the chief minister’s son, convinced the government to lay fiber optic broadband cables at the same time. “We were just envisioning and visualizing how it would be to have a state that is completely connected and wired,” he says. “What are the possibilities?”

Agriculture policy since then has followed these recommendations, slowly dismantling support programs that had made midsize family farms viable, including effective supply management through price floors, a crop reserve, and conservation incentives. Instead, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz famously directed farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” flooding the market with grain and driving down prices. If farmers couldn’t survive the price drops, Butz encouraged them to “get big or get out.” And so they did: the number of farms dropped from nearly 4.8 million in 1954 to 2.1 million by 1990.

The policies enacted in the 1950s and ’60s came to a head in the ’80s, when the weakened farm support system combined with inflation, a bad export market, and collapsed land and commodity prices in what became known as “the farm crisis.”

Over a quarter of a million farms were lost in the 1980s, the land was sold to larger operations, families were forced to move, and lifelong farmers were pushed into new jobs (or lack thereof). At least a million people were displaced from their homes and livelihoods in just 10 years—in many cases from land their families had farmed for generations. As the farmers left, so did the Main Streets and manufacturing businesses that had relied on them. Whole towns died off in the course of a decade.

Throughout the crisis, rural America felt abandoned. Communities were going through catastrophic loss and the rest of the country didn’t seem to care. Many foreclosures were purposefully accelerated by the government lending agency that held their loans, and some were done illegally and without normal due process procedures—at the behest of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials.

President Reagan made deep cuts in price supports and rural development programs, and joked that he had found a solution to the farm crisis

For its part, today’s mostly urban-based food movement has been examining what passes for agriculture and rural policy in the Presidential platforms and putting forth a platform of its own. The movement has changed the national conversation about food, but it “barely exists as a political force in Washington,” as Michael Pollan recently observed, and it’s not a strong cultural force in rural America, where corporate agriculture groups have painted good food advocates as “out-of-touch city elites.”

Feeding into the stereotype is the food movement’s relative silence on the larger implications of farm policy that rural America lives with everyday—from the festering rage that threatens to destabilize the country to the extraordinary economic inefficiencies of today’s system. Remember those dismantled supply management programs? A University of Tennessee/National Farmers Union study found that if just one of those—a farmer-owned crop reserve—had still been in place from 1998 to 2010, rather than the subsidy system cobbled together to patch the holes it left behind, taxpayers would have saved almost $96 billion, while giving farmers higher and more stable prices and keeping food prices more stable for consumers. But neither candidates nor most advocates are talking about anything of the kind.

With our national character and that kind of money at stake, perhaps it’s time to take another look at what’s been happening in rural America and the very real policy decisions that led to its decline. Agriculture policy is bigger than food; it has consequences for the health and stability of the nation. And failing to address the policy solutions that could make real changes in the lives of many desperate rural Americans will likely continue to make them feel ignored and forgotten enough to seek answers in a demagogue.

Given the Internet’s growing importance for education, health care and jobs, non-adopters are tragically mistaken about relevance. So the focus needs to be on persuading them to join us. And join us they must. The more users who join the network, the faster each added connection increases its value. The silence of older, rural and less-educated Americans from the online conversation makes all of us that much poorer.

The new digital divide can only be bridged by making digital life more relevant. And there’s a relatively simple way to do it. Older, rural, and less-educated Americans share one important characteristic -- they are all heavy users of government services. For example, 53 percent of benefits go to people 65 and older. Migrating entitlements to easy-to-use applications, and providing training through community-based groups, will make the Internet essential, if not irresistible, to those still disconnected.

What are those apps? For older Americans, they include one-stop shopping for information about Social Security, Medicare, and tailored services, such as telehealth. For rural users, as well as those with less education, key services are those that help with both education and employment: matching résumés with openings, signing up for vocational education for in-demand positions and financial aid. Health insurance and child welfare services are also critical.

Different federal and state government agencies today provide these benefits, and in many cases, some information is already online. But we need apps that pull together relevant information across government and agency boundaries and a design that is focused on convenience for the user. Deploying them quickly would not only increase online adoption but also simultaneously improve government performance and lower its cost.

The successes in Saxapahaw and Kinston are as undeniable as they are laudable, but that does not mean they meet farm-to-table’s more ambitious claims of investing in the entire community. Perhaps there is some model—like the nonprofit Benevolence Farm, near Saxapahaw, which employs women recently released from prison—that provides viability while ensuring more equitable investment. But the lesson of Saxapahaw and Kinston seems to be that farm-to-table, no matter how idealistic, is not yet able to create the community change it promises—not for the entire community, anyway.

even for those who don't believe in dark conspiracies, the solar panels popping up around town represent larger social and economic changes that always seem to be benefiting someone else.

And here's the thing: In this case, they're not wrong. Solar farms are colonizing the land around them, but residents play no part in it and get nothing out of it. Another part of the original story that didn't get much play:

The town would not benefit, from a tax base standpoint, from the solar farms because they are not located within the town limits, but only in the extraterritorial sections.

The only funding the town would get is approximately $7,000 per year for specialized training for the Woodland Fire Department in the event of an electrical malfunction at the solar plant.

...

The power generated would go directly into the electrical grid and would not reduce Woodland’s power bills.

There's nothing in it for the people of Woodland.

It's easy to mock goofy and irrational of fears about solar farms, but they are only an expression of deeper anxieties. The land that Woodland is being asked to rezone is currently zoned residential and agricultural. Rezoning it to allow solar panels amounts to admitting that it's currently going to waste. People aren't going to be living or farming there. The town is not going to grow — not now, not any time soon.

"How would you and your family like to live in the middle of a solar farm, surrounded on all four sides?"

The Woodland episode is not just a random episode of nuttiness that got exaggerated by the press. It is in fact quite representative, the intersection of two accelerating trends.

One is the spread of clean energy. Where fossil-fuel power was centralized in enormous, remote power plants, wind and solar power tend to be spread out. That means, as a simple matter of geography, they are going to touch more communities.

Second is the global trend of urbanization, which is leaving more and more small towns bereft, the tax base shrinking, the aging populace resentful toward modernity.

As clean energy spreads, it's going to bump up against more and more such towns, and clashes like the one in Woodland are only going to get more common.

In 2040, one generation from now, I will be more than 70 years old and hopefully surrounded by my first great-grandchildren. What I’d like to share with you this morning is how I imagine* the Urban Commons will be by then – and how I’d like my grand- and great-grandchildren and me to enjoy them and care for. Actually, first of all: While rethinking the issue of this conference, I realized that it should read: Imagining the „Rurban Commons.“ Because this seems to be one of the most important patterns: Interconnecting Urban and Rural. The so called Urban Agriculture or rural Maker-Spaces like the OTELOs throughout Austria are pioneering this inter-connection.